39 ms·

Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

150 points by adwmayer 10y ago

artursapek 10y ago
Google should focus on making their own shit load faster instead of digging their nails into other websites. Google Groups for example is terrible.
jzl 10y ago
The most annoying thing about AMP is that there is no way to get the original link easily. I don't necessarily mind reading the AMP version, but if I bookmark or share the link I want to be able to use the original and not Google's copy. Whose to say the AMP link will work as long as the original copy? And what if I explicitly want to use the result as an entryway into the site because I might be looking for other similar articles on the site or need other aspects of the full site experience? AMP seems like it could be maybe be a good thing, but the lack of a method to get a link to the original article exposes AMP, IMO, as the traffic and power grab that it really is.
- alpb 10y ago
  I strongly agree with this. The other day I was searching something on my phone and stumbled upon the result in Reddit, which was using AMP. I clicked the result, the AMP UI was loaded but the content area had an ever-spinning loading icon. It was frustrating, I thought maybe it was my ad-blocker on iOS, so I disabled it and tried it in Safari's Incognito mode. No luck... After 5 minutes of diverting from my main task and try to debug what is wrong with this, I gave up and just removed the AMP URL prefix to head for the actual Reddit website (not sure how a non-poweruser would figure this out). There was simply no other way to reach the information I needed from the Google Results page which did not let me leave the AMP page. Either Reddit was broken at the moment or something with AMP or something with my mobile client. But the web is supposed to "just work" and Google is seemingly breaking that with AMP. I am certain it helps some people reach to content easier with less data costs but if only it "just worked".
burai 10y ago
We used to have RSS, a standard that allowed to read articles easily and efficiently, and it died with the help of google when it killed google reader. And now they have created this new "standard" in their own garden and expect people to go and play it in exchange of better positioning. I think I'll take the suggestion I've seen here and I'll use duckduckgo
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  They couldn't put AdSense on RSS feeds.
dromen 10y ago
How does Google do this legally at all? Can I just download and redistribute any and all content I find on the net, and then present it as if it's the original? More specifically, how do they not get sued into oblivion for copyright infringement? They are after all redistributing content they are not licensed to redistribute.
dfischer 10y ago
I absolutely hate AMP. I don't understand it at all. In fact, I completely ignore the benefits – this is simply due to the UX. Any link I see with AMP in it makes me want to not tap on it on my phone. It's seriously a horrible experience on iPhone. The entire navigation is uncanny valley territory. I don't have a detailed reason why, but I know that when trying to use the browser I'm frustrated and want to leave. This feels like a poor move.
pdog 10y ago
Is there a standard way to get to the original page from the AMP page? I've ended up on too many AMP pages with no way to get to the original link.
- novia 10y ago
  Yes, if you have the option to "Request Desktop Site" in your browser, that will redirect you to the non-mobile site. Another way that works for me is to remove the first "https://www.google.com/amp/" https://www.google.com/amp/" from the url. This should direct you to the mobile version of the site.
lawnchair_larry 10y ago
Absolutely hate AMP and the inability to opt out of it.
mrkgnao 10y ago
Me personally, I dislike AMP but would be fine with some way to copy the goddamned URL of the page I'm on. The way it currently stands, AMP sort of breaks how one intuitively expects browsers to work.
longsangstan 10y ago
Surprised to see so many people hate AMP. I understand why developer/publisher may hate AMP because of development effort/stealing content... But as a reader I am inclined to click the link with the lightening bolt icon and I don't recall to see many broken page.
beezischillin 10y ago
What about announcing AMP Null, a way to disable this abomination?
anilgulecha 10y ago
I've been critical of AMP in some previous posts, but an AMP like infrastructure has the impressive advantage of trying out such optimizations and solutions, without a large affect on the users. I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the issue of content delivery under resource constraints.
- wmf 10y ago
  Here's an open version of AMP in the works: https://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/ https://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  Cloudflare just launched its own AMP viewer and cache: https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/
  - sdfhbdf 10y ago
    It didn't launch its own AMP. They are now supporting Google's AMP by replacing all links on CloudFlare powered webpage into AMP ones with that little thunderbolt.
    - jgrahamc 10y ago
      It's the same standard but it's Cloudflare's own viewer, cache and the AMP URLs are managed by Cloudflare and not Google.
- neilcarpenter 10y ago
  AMP is open - https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml
  - e12e 10y ago
    That's what's so insidious. You enable amp, like maybe you started using png over just gifs - and then Google takes your search hits hostage by rewriting the url, adding a banner - and forcing you to keep the amp version if it turned out to fit you and your users or not. The amp spec looks friendly and harmless - a good use of html5's flexibility. On the surface the only odd bit is the reliance of js to get the "new" image tags to work (with resulting reduced flexibility wrt Web user agents, like w3m). And suddenly Google controls your page design for everyone that finds your site through Google!
pmlnr 10y ago
"We remove image data that is invisible to users, such as thumbnail and geolocation metadata. For JPEG images, we also reduce quality and color samples if they are higher than necessary." Great. Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image. These things should be opt-in.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I would love it if all AMP sites were opt-in. I understand the target audience and I agree that making the web a faster place is important. However, there are tradeoffs that come with AMP, and I personally have an amazingly fast and unlimited LTE connection. I don't need AMP, so all I get is the downsides with none of the positives. The mobile Internet has become a far more frustrating place for me since Google introduced AMP. I just want to be able to turn it off.
- mathw 10y ago
  They are. You don't have to publish an AMP version.
  - rch 10y ago
    That's what I thought as well. If you're publishing special images and JS then don't include AMP metadata. Some of the concerns really should be addressed though: a clickable and copyable link could be handled with a widget at the bottom of the page, for instance.
  - pmlnr 10y ago
    > You don't have to publish an AMP version. For now. I do have a bad feeling that Google will keep pushing towards this.
  - fragmede 10y ago
    Except with Google's stranglehold on Google Search Engine results, not publishing an AMP version means you will probably rank below a similiar AMP-"enhanced" version from a competitor. That's not really an option, unless you're trying to go after the Bing/DuckDuckGo market.
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saycheese 10y ago
There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional elements into a page that are detectable by the average user. Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time. As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.
- applejuicestand 10y ago
  Looking at this from the users perspective, the URL is becoming less noticeable anyway. On mobile you don't have the screen real estate for it. And I don't see the average user complaining about the sub-second loading times. If anything, this is a step in the right direction.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Hey, just like they did with G+...and look how that went. Something something making the same mistakes over and over again.
- ClassyJacket 10y ago
  It also sucks if you want to interact with the page, since, inanely, you can't click through to the real page.
  - wmf 10y ago
    What can you do on the real page that you can't do on the AMP version?
    - granshaw 10y ago
      comments, etc
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      Navigate the site, share the underlying page, etc.
c0l0 10y ago
"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]" Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication with your actual users.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  "Instead of helping sites to solve the problem, we'll take care of it for them! And no need to worry about vendor lock-in, we're 'not evil', remember?" I wish they'd just push to solve the actual problem, instead of using this as a chance to push people into their system. The issue they are trying to solve is absolutely real, but adding more layers and complexity to prevent layers and complexity is the opposite approach that they should be taking.
  - cmac2992 10y ago
    I think they have been trying to push people in that direction. They penalize you for having slow load times and too small of touch zones among a variety of other ux factors. But the progress has been slow.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      Have they? I'm not arguing, I'm genuinely curious because I guess I don't ever see that happening. Whenever I search for something that has a bunch of results, like weather, I end up with 30s loading, JS-filled, nightmare sites that are slow, bulky and don't show the information in a clean format. Yet there are good, simple sites like http://myfreeweather.com/ http://myfreeweather.com/ that are ~8 pages into the results. I don't pretend to know half of the metrics they use to rank a site, but IME, it doesn't seem like speed is at all relevant.
MrVitaliy 10y ago
I'm against AMP simply because it doesn't work with Safari on iOS. In fact, I switched to DuckDuckGo as a default search engine because less accurate search is still better than a list of accurate results that simply don't open.
- MBCook 10y ago
  I'm real close to doing the same. I can't believe they shipped something with such a terrible user experience on so many high profile devices.
- artimaeis 10y ago
  Can you detail the issues you've had with AMP pages? I use Safari on iOS 10.2 daily and have never noticed an issue loading AMP pages.
  - MrVitaliy 10y ago
    I'm on iOS 10.2 also. Searching for something like "site:reddit.com casserole" gives a couple of AMP results. Clicking them just shows google loading circle thingy indefinitely, the page never opens.
    - djrogers 10y ago
      I just did this on my iPhone, and it worked instantly. In fact I've never seen an AMP page that doesn't load... My guess would be that you have a content blocker, ad blocker, anonymizing proxy, DNS server with ad-blocking, or something in your setup that's breaking it, because it's not broken natively.
      - stuckagain 10y ago
        I also confirm this works fine for me on Safari and iOS 10.2 (iPhone SE, not that I think it matters).
        10y ago
CameronBanga 10y ago
AMP is breaking the web, and while it offers great speed, I think the consequences of breaking and hijacking all urls greatly outweighs the advantages. Really can't be in favor of it until those issues are fixed.
- claudius 10y ago
  AMP offers no more or less speed than standard HTML. Even on a slow connection, the majority of that slowness is due to the last mile, not because it takes a long time to get data from Europe to Australia. It really is only about getting yet another way to collect data on users and push ads down their throats.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    AMP addresses the last-mile concern by constraining the content of the page to mitigate both low-bandwidth connections and low-power rendering agents. Have you used it? Even on a Nexus 5x running on fast wifi, the difference between loading a Washington Post site from AMP and from washingtonpost.com is tangible.
    - claudius 10y ago
      This is absolutely the fault of the publisher, not of anyone else. If the people running that site wanted to offer a slim and fast experience, they could absolutely do so without including additional Javascript from god-knows-where and whatever other “features” AMP requires.
kevinSuttle 10y ago
What the what? I thought AMP was designed specifically to be performant and light?
petre 10y ago
Is there a way to block AMP and load the real page instead?
- franze 10y ago
  no
- ino 10y ago
  yes, use https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com
  - dandv 10y ago
    Or Request Desktop Site from your browser. Or edit the URL to remove the beginning from "http" to "/amp/s". Or View Source and go to the link in "link rel='canonical'".
maverick_iceman 10y ago
I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot of the target users would be unaware/unable to opt-in.
- dfischer 10y ago
  It should be opt-in then. The UX is lackluster.
- milankragujevic 10y ago
  They could just use Opera Mini, or have Google fix their Web Compression Proxy so it actually compresses HTTPS, and if you opt in then it's all good, and have it prompt users on slow connections to enable it like how Opera 12 prompted you to enable Opera Turbo.
- flukus 10y ago
  I think HN and much of the tech crowd also forget how unreliable internet connections can be. I don't know what it's like in silicon valley, but here my 4G connection will drop out several times on my short commute to work and webapps generally don't cope with it well, or at all.
- geofft 10y ago
  It's a huge benefit with long-term negative consequences. It's the same reason the HN/EFF crowd is opposed to things like T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, where video traffic from certain providers doesn't count against your bandwidth: it's unquestionably great for an individual end user wanting to access that site, but it sets up a system where certain incumbent providers have structural advantages against newcomers—i.e., it violates net neutrality. In the future, that same end user is likely to consider getting content from another site, and be dissuaded because Binge On (or AMP) doesn't apply. A provider-neutral solution wouldn't get in the way of competition and growth. This is the same logic behind monopolies being bad. Nobody thought AT&T was bad for providing phone service to everyone in America; that was unquestionably great. What was bad was the way that nobody else could provide potentially-better phone services. Nobody thought Microsoft was bad for giving people a web browser in the IE 4 days; what was bad was abusing their OS monopoly to gain a web browser monopoly, because IE 5 and 6 started implementing MS-specific technology. There are lots of ways to implement the benefits of AMP without the vendor lock-in Google is pushing. It's certainly technically much easier for Google to implement it in the way they're currently doing so, but that's a short-term and short-sighted gain.
adtac 10y ago
To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow 2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference is night and day. You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.
- beezischillin 10y ago
  I tried opening sites with AMP, and some of them didn't even load. 1000/300 AC 5ghz wifi. What is page speed when sites don't load? My guess is even on 2G that's not an added bonus..
- Spare_account 10y ago
  Just having a cookie-based opt-out would be fine. I don't want AMP but I won't presume to know what other Internet users want. Google is presuming to know what I want and it is irritating.
- claudius 10y ago
  The publisher can trivially create a light website which loads just as quickly as the AMP version.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  Nonsense. Let it be bloated. Let people wait and pay. They won't go back, and that would be the point. This way, google "saves" those sites by essentially stealing content, since from now on, visitors won't even hit your site.
- wandernotlost 10y ago
  This has absolutely nothing to do with AMP. May I remind you that slow Internet connections are not a new phenomenon. Try browsing the web on a 9600 baud modem. The means for solving this problem (content negotiation, carefully crafted pages, CSS media selectors) have existed since the dawn of the web, and AMP is a terrible solution that carries the collateral damage of obscuring the URL/source of the original resource and hijacking the presentation of the page.
  - 10y ago
andy_ppp 10y ago
To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are everything now. EDIT Also I'd add further that at some point, this "free" and compulsory AMP cache will start inserting google ads directly into pages and Google will pay publishers a small percentage of what those slots are worth.
- shostack 10y ago
  This is in essence what happened with FB Instant Articles. Many publishers are hurting from it because their CPMs dropped and they didn't get people on their properties. They didn't really have a choice in the matter though. Some, like BuzzFeed have adapted their models to thrive in this new reality. Google is thus trying to keep people in their "feed" and reduce the cost of their ad inventory by (in theory) reducing publisher payouts over time as a result of this leverage.
rubyn00bie 10y ago
I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me). Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS. Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens. More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results. I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services. Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.
- Lazare 10y ago
  Conversely, I love AMP. I find it works well, I don't think there's any abuse of power, and I think it's an entirely necessary standard.
  - RileyKyeden 10y ago
    Same. An AMP link tells me two things: 1: I won't have a page that bounces around for 5 minutes as useless, non-content elements load. 2: I won't have to peer at a few lines of content through a window of toolbars and ads.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      Reader view in mobile safari solves these things client-side. There are others. It's a rendering decision which should be left to the client vs forcing a decision on users in a way which breaks some configurations for people (since there's no way to disable AMP).
greenspot 10y ago
I have a bad feeling. Google is creating a proprietary version of the mobile Internet, a layer between them and us. Looking at the specs, it's open but paired with the AMP cache and Google's ranking algorithm which already clearly prefers AMPed pages it doesn't feel like a free choice. What if I don't want to use Google's AMP cache and rather my own CDN? What if I don't want this useless AMP banner at the top of my AMPed pages which takes 25% of the screen estate for nothing? What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec?
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec? Then it's harder for google to make _more_ money out of you. It's all about growth, and since they won search, they are desperately trying to grasp something.
- mikecb 10y ago
  Cloudflare just launched their own amp cache. Nothing proprietary about this.
  - saurik 10y ago
    As far as I can tell, to do this they had to partner with Google, who are the arbiters of what is and is not AMP compatible. This is absolutely "proprietary" and honestly pisses me off even more than if it were only Google's servers in charge of this stuff as now they are screwing with the CDN market as well :/. An open standard is something anyone can implement and be compatible with, without permission.
    - mikecb 10y ago
      You may take from the story what you wish, but afaik, the collaboration you're referring to was informal engineering discussion, not required permission. I can't charitably get to your interpretation from the blog posts or public comments by those at CF.
      - 10y ago
andy_ppp 10y ago
To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are everything now.
tiffanyh 10y ago
There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch. I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in parts of the world still on 2G or 3G. If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.
- bryanrasmussen 10y ago
  well then they could have announced that they were going to aggressively penalize sites that were too bloated and SEO would take of the rest.
- monochromatic 10y ago
  If the issue were really about page speed, google could penalize the rankings of slow sites. No need to shovel a broken, self-hosted version of the site onto me.
- greenspot 10y ago
  > 5 different JavaScript frameworks This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.
zorked 10y ago
Contrarian view: I love AMP and I find myself clicking AMP links far more often because I can get the information I want much faster. And this is on LTE. AMP should be supported by CDNs and toggleable in the browsers though.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. Google is just trying to solve it in a way that gives them more power, rather than trying to fix the root problem.
- asdfologist 10y ago
  I thought I'm the only one. It's really fast and easy to use. I don't understand all the hate here.
  - brainfire 10y ago
    Site operators are mad that they can't ruin our experience as thoroughly any more.
Jazgot 10y ago
I hate AMP! Please check this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/8ogdv04Cm-k/6KpwLBKkEwAJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Hilariously, when I try to visit that on mobile, it wants me to log into my Google account, with no way to not do that.
NicoJuicy 10y ago
To all people who are defending AMP with 2g arguments, i never have 2g, 3g is the minimum. I don't like it. Make it opt-out please :)
matthewmacleod 10y ago
I definitely agree with the overall feeling on HN – AMP is probably one of the worst things to happen to the open web. I could even just ignore this problem if there was a way for me to say "I have a 10Mbps 4G connection, please show me the actual site and not this broken half-implementation of it." Even then, it's sketchy.
franze 10y ago
I implemented AMP on my own project and we implemented it at some clients ... all regret it. The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them. And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.) Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to our site...". AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.
- fixermark 10y ago
  Question: Why do you not then just switch off the AMP support and stick with responsive pages? It sounds like you just generated an A/B test with some pretty easy-to-interpret results.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    because nobody used amp because they assumed it was a good idea. it's 100% because google gives better seo position if you use it. so no test needed to know it's garbage. everyone already knew.
  - franze 10y ago
    a) for deleting amp you need to implement some ping logic https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping#remove-amp-content https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping#remove-a... b) deleting page(variations) big scale is always a traffic risk c) deleting AMP it's already discussed (by literally everybody), so it will happen (soon...ish) d) the one reason not to do it is currently market monitoring. even though there is currently no major traffic benefit doesn't mean there will not be one in the future. so it's just a question of when the pain of AMP gets greater than the market-surveillance / curiosity / traffic bet. Basically everybody who currently has AMP pages is the experiment guinea pig for the whole industry. My bet: Most of the AMP implementations won't survive 2018.
- zlynx 10y ago
iainmerrick 10y ago
And don't forget: at least 99% of users will be completely unaware of AMP. They'll use it by default because lots of Google search results use AMP. Google gets to make this happen because they own the users, and there's very little to be done about it. The only countermeasure I can think of is if lots of publishers were to boycott AMP en masse. But publishers have been unable to reduce web bloat any other way, so what would their upside be?
timsayshey 10y ago
I tried to share an AMP article from Gizmodo with my wife the other day. I just texted her the link that I copied from my Firefox Mobile browser. She said it was broken. And sure enough, it was broken. What a pain, the url only works for me? Edit: wording
devy 10y ago
From what I read, majority of the focus of page bytes reduction to optimize fro mobile experiences is on lowering JPEG image quality (AMP Lite) and/or fixate it to 85% for AMP. I wonder why Google is taking a fixed reduction of image quality reduction rather than considering a dynamic image quality reduction approach like JPEGMini[1] and Kraken.io[2] took? The latter ones will take visual perceptions into consideration hence they are usually able to squeeze out more bytes savings in the end. [1]: https://www.jpegmini.com https://www.jpegmini.com [2]: https://kraken.io https://kraken.io
Panino 10y ago
I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!") From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most. Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middle finger to these people. ("I drink your milkshake!") IMO the right solution is to use speed as an increasingly more important ranking signal. Push crummy bloated websites to the bottom where they belong. I read the article but didn't see Google address this rather obvious idea.
- discreditable 10y ago
  > I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!") Yes, I think the ease of publishing has led to a lot of people publishing who don't know what they're doing. I have an issue with our "webmaster" inserting full-resolution >4mb photos into our site pages to display at 200x400 boxes. I've told them several times that they need to keep image sizes down, but the person is never consistent. I wish I could disable caching on that user's PC so they could see how horrible our initial page loads are. I try not to browse our website because I want to fix the bad pieces and it's futile because what I improve is eventually undone when new content is rotated in. I'm just the systems guy, and our website is run by marketing.
- acdha 10y ago
  > From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. One look at the source code for most popular sites shows this isn't true – and that makes sense because when you look at the average sluggish site the bloat is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML source. What's actually happening is that a bunch of people are working hard on something which is important to them but not the user: advertising and analytics, followed by “social” sharing. Since those numbers are associated with revenue, they're directly seen as important whereas concerns about page-weight are more subtle and often an inadequate check on bloat until it gets really bad.
  - 10y ago
malchow 10y ago
AMP was originally a more interesting project called PageSpeed that was open to anyone running webserver(s). I helped the Goog guys work on it by dint of having founded a premium adexchange company. It was great. AMP? Somewhat less great.
- fixermark 10y ago
  Actually, they're separate. PageSpeed is still here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
  - malchow 10y ago
    They were one and the same. AMP looked more profitable, so PageSpeed Service was deprecated. Only the documentation remains.
    - dandv 10y ago
      No, they weren't. Apache mod-pagespeed is and has been a completely different effort.
pcora 10y ago
Yep. Google Results are better but I switched to DDG because of AMP too. Crappy implementation that does not let me get the URL to share a link.
- fixermark 10y ago
  You can share the AMP link.
- cekvenich3 10y ago
  What is DDG?
  - robin_reala 10y ago
    https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
cekvenich3 10y ago
Even w/o AMP you need to have a no javascript version for SEO. Even w/o AMP you need to have fast downloading images. Even w/o AMP you must use a CDN. So don't call it AMP. Call it: "SEO optimized and for when users are not on Wi-Fi or for huge scale/load". You can include the lighting bolt or not. Wha, wha.
techbio 10y ago
No one here seems to have mentioned Google's back-end wins from cached smaller, standardized code and images. It's their datacenter using fewer ops on more content to do what they initially set out to do--organize the world's information. Normalized images associated with a reduction in front-end presentation content can train the IRL bots orders of magnitude more quickly.
Groxx 10y ago
It'd be far more useful if they benchmarked rendering speed for pages (game-able, obviously, but so is everything), and just favored faster ones. AMP could be one of many systems then, instead of taking as much control as possible. Instead, we have a one-size-fits-all that they control utterly. No option to do something that works just as well, via different means (your own image compression, optimized http2 support, etc). Kill it with fire.

150 points by adwmayer 10y ago

Google should focus on making their own shit load faster instead of digging their nails into other websites. Google Groups for example is terrible.

jzl 10y ago

The most annoying thing about AMP is that there is no way to get the original link easily. I don't necessarily mind reading the AMP version, but if I bookmark or share the link I want to be able to use the original and not Google's copy. Whose to say the AMP link will work as long as the original copy? And what if I explicitly want to use the result as an entryway into the site because I might be looking for other similar articles on the site or need other aspects of the full site experience? AMP seems like it could be maybe be a good thing, but the lack of a method to get a link to the original article exposes AMP, IMO, as the traffic and power grab that it really is.

alpb 10y ago
I strongly agree with this. The other day I was searching something on my phone and stumbled upon the result in Reddit, which was using AMP. I clicked the result, the AMP UI was loaded but the content area had an ever-spinning loading icon. It was frustrating, I thought maybe it was my ad-blocker on iOS, so I disabled it and tried it in Safari's Incognito mode. No luck... After 5 minutes of diverting from my main task and try to debug what is wrong with this, I gave up and just removed the AMP URL prefix to head for the actual Reddit website (not sure how a non-poweruser would figure this out). There was simply no other way to reach the information I needed from the Google Results page which did not let me leave the AMP page. Either Reddit was broken at the moment or something with AMP or something with my mobile client. But the web is supposed to "just work" and Google is seemingly breaking that with AMP. I am certain it helps some people reach to content easier with less data costs but if only it "just worked".

burai 10y ago

We used to have RSS, a standard that allowed to read articles easily and efficiently, and it died with the help of google when it killed google reader. And now they have created this new "standard" in their own garden and expect people to go and play it in exchange of better positioning. I think I'll take the suggestion I've seen here and I'll use duckduckgo

seanp2k2 10y ago
They couldn't put AdSense on RSS feeds.

dromen 10y ago

How does Google do this legally at all? Can I just download and redistribute any and all content I find on the net, and then present it as if it's the original? More specifically, how do they not get sued into oblivion for copyright infringement? They are after all redistributing content they are not licensed to redistribute.

dfischer 10y ago

I absolutely hate AMP. I don't understand it at all. In fact, I completely ignore the benefits – this is simply due to the UX. Any link I see with AMP in it makes me want to not tap on it on my phone. It's seriously a horrible experience on iPhone. The entire navigation is uncanny valley territory. I don't have a detailed reason why, but I know that when trying to use the browser I'm frustrated and want to leave. This feels like a poor move.

pdog 10y ago

Is there a standard way to get to the original page from the AMP page? I've ended up on too many AMP pages with no way to get to the original link.

novia 10y ago
Yes, if you have the option to "Request Desktop Site" in your browser, that will redirect you to the non-mobile site. Another way that works for me is to remove the first "https://www.google.com/amp/" https://www.google.com/amp/" from the url. This should direct you to the mobile version of the site.

lawnchair_larry 10y ago

Absolutely hate AMP and the inability to opt out of it.

mrkgnao 10y ago

Me personally, I dislike AMP but would be fine with some way to copy the goddamned URL of the page I'm on. The way it currently stands, AMP sort of breaks how one intuitively expects browsers to work.

longsangstan 10y ago

Surprised to see so many people hate AMP. I understand why developer/publisher may hate AMP because of development effort/stealing content... But as a reader I am inclined to click the link with the lightening bolt icon and I don't recall to see many broken page.

beezischillin 10y ago

What about announcing AMP Null, a way to disable this abomination?

anilgulecha 10y ago

I've been critical of AMP in some previous posts, but an AMP like infrastructure has the impressive advantage of trying out such optimizations and solutions, without a large affect on the users. I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the issue of content delivery under resource constraints.

wmf 10y ago
Here's an open version of AMP in the works: https://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/ https://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/
jgrahamc 10y ago
Cloudflare just launched its own AMP viewer and cache: https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/
- sdfhbdf 10y ago
  It didn't launch its own AMP. They are now supporting Google's AMP by replacing all links on CloudFlare powered webpage into AMP ones with that little thunderbolt.
  - jgrahamc 10y ago
    It's the same standard but it's Cloudflare's own viewer, cache and the AMP URLs are managed by Cloudflare and not Google.
neilcarpenter 10y ago
AMP is open - https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml
- e12e 10y ago
  That's what's so insidious. You enable amp, like maybe you started using png over just gifs - and then Google takes your search hits hostage by rewriting the url, adding a banner - and forcing you to keep the amp version if it turned out to fit you and your users or not. The amp spec looks friendly and harmless - a good use of html5's flexibility. On the surface the only odd bit is the reliance of js to get the "new" image tags to work (with resulting reduced flexibility wrt Web user agents, like w3m). And suddenly Google controls your page design for everyone that finds your site through Google!

pmlnr 10y ago

"We remove image data that is invisible to users, such as thumbnail and geolocation metadata. For JPEG images, we also reduce quality and color samples if they are higher than necessary." Great. Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image. These things should be opt-in.

freehunter 10y ago
I would love it if all AMP sites were opt-in. I understand the target audience and I agree that making the web a faster place is important. However, there are tradeoffs that come with AMP, and I personally have an amazingly fast and unlimited LTE connection. I don't need AMP, so all I get is the downsides with none of the positives. The mobile Internet has become a far more frustrating place for me since Google introduced AMP. I just want to be able to turn it off.
mathw 10y ago
They are. You don't have to publish an AMP version.
- rch 10y ago
  That's what I thought as well. If you're publishing special images and JS then don't include AMP metadata. Some of the concerns really should be addressed though: a clickable and copyable link could be handled with a widget at the bottom of the page, for instance.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > You don't have to publish an AMP version. For now. I do have a bad feeling that Google will keep pushing towards this.
- fragmede 10y ago
  Except with Google's stranglehold on Google Search Engine results, not publishing an AMP version means you will probably rank below a similiar AMP-"enhanced" version from a competitor. That's not really an option, unless you're trying to go after the Bing/DuckDuckGo market.

deleted 10y ago

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saycheese 10y ago

There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional elements into a page that are detectable by the average user. Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time. As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.

applejuicestand 10y ago
Looking at this from the users perspective, the URL is becoming less noticeable anyway. On mobile you don't have the screen real estate for it. And I don't see the average user complaining about the sub-second loading times. If anything, this is a step in the right direction.
seanp2k2 10y ago
Hey, just like they did with G+...and look how that went. Something something making the same mistakes over and over again.
ClassyJacket 10y ago
It also sucks if you want to interact with the page, since, inanely, you can't click through to the real page.
- wmf 10y ago
  What can you do on the real page that you can't do on the AMP version?
  - granshaw 10y ago
    comments, etc
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    Navigate the site, share the underlying page, etc.

c0l0 10y ago

"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]" Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication with your actual users.

CaptSpify 10y ago
"Instead of helping sites to solve the problem, we'll take care of it for them! And no need to worry about vendor lock-in, we're 'not evil', remember?" I wish they'd just push to solve the actual problem, instead of using this as a chance to push people into their system. The issue they are trying to solve is absolutely real, but adding more layers and complexity to prevent layers and complexity is the opposite approach that they should be taking.
- cmac2992 10y ago
  I think they have been trying to push people in that direction. They penalize you for having slow load times and too small of touch zones among a variety of other ux factors. But the progress has been slow.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Have they? I'm not arguing, I'm genuinely curious because I guess I don't ever see that happening. Whenever I search for something that has a bunch of results, like weather, I end up with 30s loading, JS-filled, nightmare sites that are slow, bulky and don't show the information in a clean format. Yet there are good, simple sites like http://myfreeweather.com/ http://myfreeweather.com/ that are ~8 pages into the results. I don't pretend to know half of the metrics they use to rank a site, but IME, it doesn't seem like speed is at all relevant.

MrVitaliy 10y ago

I'm against AMP simply because it doesn't work with Safari on iOS. In fact, I switched to DuckDuckGo as a default search engine because less accurate search is still better than a list of accurate results that simply don't open.

MBCook 10y ago
I'm real close to doing the same. I can't believe they shipped something with such a terrible user experience on so many high profile devices.
artimaeis 10y ago
Can you detail the issues you've had with AMP pages? I use Safari on iOS 10.2 daily and have never noticed an issue loading AMP pages.
- MrVitaliy 10y ago
  I'm on iOS 10.2 also. Searching for something like "site:reddit.com casserole" gives a couple of AMP results. Clicking them just shows google loading circle thingy indefinitely, the page never opens.
  - djrogers 10y ago
    I just did this on my iPhone, and it worked instantly. In fact I've never seen an AMP page that doesn't load... My guess would be that you have a content blocker, ad blocker, anonymizing proxy, DNS server with ad-blocking, or something in your setup that's breaking it, because it's not broken natively.
    - stuckagain 10y ago
      I also confirm this works fine for me on Safari and iOS 10.2 (iPhone SE, not that I think it matters).
      - 10y ago

CameronBanga 10y ago

AMP is breaking the web, and while it offers great speed, I think the consequences of breaking and hijacking all urls greatly outweighs the advantages. Really can't be in favor of it until those issues are fixed.

claudius 10y ago
AMP offers no more or less speed than standard HTML. Even on a slow connection, the majority of that slowness is due to the last mile, not because it takes a long time to get data from Europe to Australia. It really is only about getting yet another way to collect data on users and push ads down their throats.
- fixermark 10y ago
  AMP addresses the last-mile concern by constraining the content of the page to mitigate both low-bandwidth connections and low-power rendering agents. Have you used it? Even on a Nexus 5x running on fast wifi, the difference between loading a Washington Post site from AMP and from washingtonpost.com is tangible.
  - claudius 10y ago
    This is absolutely the fault of the publisher, not of anyone else. If the people running that site wanted to offer a slim and fast experience, they could absolutely do so without including additional Javascript from god-knows-where and whatever other “features” AMP requires.

kevinSuttle 10y ago

What the what? I thought AMP was designed specifically to be performant and light?

petre 10y ago

Is there a way to block AMP and load the real page instead?

franze 10y ago
no
ino 10y ago
yes, use https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com
- dandv 10y ago
  Or Request Desktop Site from your browser. Or edit the URL to remove the beginning from "http" to "/amp/s". Or View Source and go to the link in "link rel='canonical'".

maverick_iceman 10y ago

I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot of the target users would be unaware/unable to opt-in.

dfischer 10y ago
It should be opt-in then. The UX is lackluster.
milankragujevic 10y ago
They could just use Opera Mini, or have Google fix their Web Compression Proxy so it actually compresses HTTPS, and if you opt in then it's all good, and have it prompt users on slow connections to enable it like how Opera 12 prompted you to enable Opera Turbo.
flukus 10y ago
I think HN and much of the tech crowd also forget how unreliable internet connections can be. I don't know what it's like in silicon valley, but here my 4G connection will drop out several times on my short commute to work and webapps generally don't cope with it well, or at all.
geofft 10y ago
It's a huge benefit with long-term negative consequences. It's the same reason the HN/EFF crowd is opposed to things like T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, where video traffic from certain providers doesn't count against your bandwidth: it's unquestionably great for an individual end user wanting to access that site, but it sets up a system where certain incumbent providers have structural advantages against newcomers—i.e., it violates net neutrality. In the future, that same end user is likely to consider getting content from another site, and be dissuaded because Binge On (or AMP) doesn't apply. A provider-neutral solution wouldn't get in the way of competition and growth. This is the same logic behind monopolies being bad. Nobody thought AT&T was bad for providing phone service to everyone in America; that was unquestionably great. What was bad was the way that nobody else could provide potentially-better phone services. Nobody thought Microsoft was bad for giving people a web browser in the IE 4 days; what was bad was abusing their OS monopoly to gain a web browser monopoly, because IE 5 and 6 started implementing MS-specific technology. There are lots of ways to implement the benefits of AMP without the vendor lock-in Google is pushing. It's certainly technically much easier for Google to implement it in the way they're currently doing so, but that's a short-term and short-sighted gain.

adtac 10y ago

To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow 2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference is night and day. You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.

beezischillin 10y ago
I tried opening sites with AMP, and some of them didn't even load. 1000/300 AC 5ghz wifi. What is page speed when sites don't load? My guess is even on 2G that's not an added bonus..
Spare_account 10y ago
Just having a cookie-based opt-out would be fine. I don't want AMP but I won't presume to know what other Internet users want. Google is presuming to know what I want and it is irritating.
claudius 10y ago
The publisher can trivially create a light website which loads just as quickly as the AMP version.
pmlnr 10y ago
Nonsense. Let it be bloated. Let people wait and pay. They won't go back, and that would be the point. This way, google "saves" those sites by essentially stealing content, since from now on, visitors won't even hit your site.
wandernotlost 10y ago
This has absolutely nothing to do with AMP. May I remind you that slow Internet connections are not a new phenomenon. Try browsing the web on a 9600 baud modem. The means for solving this problem (content negotiation, carefully crafted pages, CSS media selectors) have existed since the dawn of the web, and AMP is a terrible solution that carries the collateral damage of obscuring the URL/source of the original resource and hijacking the presentation of the page.
- 10y ago

andy_ppp 10y ago

To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are everything now. EDIT Also I'd add further that at some point, this "free" and compulsory AMP cache will start inserting google ads directly into pages and Google will pay publishers a small percentage of what those slots are worth.

shostack 10y ago
This is in essence what happened with FB Instant Articles. Many publishers are hurting from it because their CPMs dropped and they didn't get people on their properties. They didn't really have a choice in the matter though. Some, like BuzzFeed have adapted their models to thrive in this new reality. Google is thus trying to keep people in their "feed" and reduce the cost of their ad inventory by (in theory) reducing publisher payouts over time as a result of this leverage.

rubyn00bie 10y ago

I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me). Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS. Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens. More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results. I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services. Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.

Lazare 10y ago
Conversely, I love AMP. I find it works well, I don't think there's any abuse of power, and I think it's an entirely necessary standard.
- RileyKyeden 10y ago
  Same. An AMP link tells me two things: 1: I won't have a page that bounces around for 5 minutes as useless, non-content elements load. 2: I won't have to peer at a few lines of content through a window of toolbars and ads.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Reader view in mobile safari solves these things client-side. There are others. It's a rendering decision which should be left to the client vs forcing a decision on users in a way which breaks some configurations for people (since there's no way to disable AMP).

greenspot 10y ago

I have a bad feeling. Google is creating a proprietary version of the mobile Internet, a layer between them and us. Looking at the specs, it's open but paired with the AMP cache and Google's ranking algorithm which already clearly prefers AMPed pages it doesn't feel like a free choice. What if I don't want to use Google's AMP cache and rather my own CDN? What if I don't want this useless AMP banner at the top of my AMPed pages which takes 25% of the screen estate for nothing? What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec?

pmlnr 10y ago
> What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec? Then it's harder for google to make _more_ money out of you. It's all about growth, and since they won search, they are desperately trying to grasp something.
mikecb 10y ago
Cloudflare just launched their own amp cache. Nothing proprietary about this.
- saurik 10y ago
  As far as I can tell, to do this they had to partner with Google, who are the arbiters of what is and is not AMP compatible. This is absolutely "proprietary" and honestly pisses me off even more than if it were only Google's servers in charge of this stuff as now they are screwing with the CDN market as well :/. An open standard is something anyone can implement and be compatible with, without permission.
  - mikecb 10y ago
    You may take from the story what you wish, but afaik, the collaboration you're referring to was informal engineering discussion, not required permission. I can't charitably get to your interpretation from the blog posts or public comments by those at CF.
    - 10y ago

andy_ppp 10y ago

tiffanyh 10y ago

There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch. I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in parts of the world still on 2G or 3G. If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.

bryanrasmussen 10y ago
well then they could have announced that they were going to aggressively penalize sites that were too bloated and SEO would take of the rest.
monochromatic 10y ago
If the issue were really about page speed, google could penalize the rankings of slow sites. No need to shovel a broken, self-hosted version of the site onto me.
greenspot 10y ago
> 5 different JavaScript frameworks This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.

zorked 10y ago

Contrarian view: I love AMP and I find myself clicking AMP links far more often because I can get the information I want much faster. And this is on LTE. AMP should be supported by CDNs and toggleable in the browsers though.

CaptSpify 10y ago
The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. Google is just trying to solve it in a way that gives them more power, rather than trying to fix the root problem.
asdfologist 10y ago
I thought I'm the only one. It's really fast and easy to use. I don't understand all the hate here.
- brainfire 10y ago
  Site operators are mad that they can't ruin our experience as thoroughly any more.

Jazgot 10y ago

I hate AMP! Please check this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/8ogdv04Cm-k/6KpwLBKkEwAJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...

seanp2k2 10y ago
Hilariously, when I try to visit that on mobile, it wants me to log into my Google account, with no way to not do that.

NicoJuicy 10y ago

To all people who are defending AMP with 2g arguments, i never have 2g, 3g is the minimum. I don't like it. Make it opt-out please :)

matthewmacleod 10y ago

I definitely agree with the overall feeling on HN – AMP is probably one of the worst things to happen to the open web. I could even just ignore this problem if there was a way for me to say "I have a 10Mbps 4G connection, please show me the actual site and not this broken half-implementation of it." Even then, it's sketchy.

franze 10y ago

I implemented AMP on my own project and we implemented it at some clients ... all regret it. The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them. And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.) Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to our site...". AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.

fixermark 10y ago
Question: Why do you not then just switch off the AMP support and stick with responsive pages? It sounds like you just generated an A/B test with some pretty easy-to-interpret results.
- gcb0 10y ago
  because nobody used amp because they assumed it was a good idea. it's 100% because google gives better seo position if you use it. so no test needed to know it's garbage. everyone already knew.
- franze 10y ago
  a) for deleting amp you need to implement some ping logic https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping#remove-amp-content https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping#remove-a... b) deleting page(variations) big scale is always a traffic risk c) deleting AMP it's already discussed (by literally everybody), so it will happen (soon...ish) d) the one reason not to do it is currently market monitoring. even though there is currently no major traffic benefit doesn't mean there will not be one in the future. so it's just a question of when the pain of AMP gets greater than the market-surveillance / curiosity / traffic bet. Basically everybody who currently has AMP pages is the experiment guinea pig for the whole industry. My bet: Most of the AMP implementations won't survive 2018.
zlynx 10y ago

iainmerrick 10y ago

And don't forget: at least 99% of users will be completely unaware of AMP. They'll use it by default because lots of Google search results use AMP. Google gets to make this happen because they own the users, and there's very little to be done about it. The only countermeasure I can think of is if lots of publishers were to boycott AMP en masse. But publishers have been unable to reduce web bloat any other way, so what would their upside be?

timsayshey 10y ago

I tried to share an AMP article from Gizmodo with my wife the other day. I just texted her the link that I copied from my Firefox Mobile browser. She said it was broken. And sure enough, it was broken. What a pain, the url only works for me? Edit: wording

devy 10y ago

From what I read, majority of the focus of page bytes reduction to optimize fro mobile experiences is on lowering JPEG image quality (AMP Lite) and/or fixate it to 85% for AMP. I wonder why Google is taking a fixed reduction of image quality reduction rather than considering a dynamic image quality reduction approach like JPEGMini[1] and Kraken.io[2] took? The latter ones will take visual perceptions into consideration hence they are usually able to squeeze out more bytes savings in the end. [1]: https://www.jpegmini.com https://www.jpegmini.com [2]: https://kraken.io https://kraken.io

Panino 10y ago

I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!") From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most. Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middle finger to these people. ("I drink your milkshake!") IMO the right solution is to use speed as an increasingly more important ranking signal. Push crummy bloated websites to the bottom where they belong. I read the article but didn't see Google address this rather obvious idea.

discreditable 10y ago
> I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!") Yes, I think the ease of publishing has led to a lot of people publishing who don't know what they're doing. I have an issue with our "webmaster" inserting full-resolution >4mb photos into our site pages to display at 200x400 boxes. I've told them several times that they need to keep image sizes down, but the person is never consistent. I wish I could disable caching on that user's PC so they could see how horrible our initial page loads are. I try not to browse our website because I want to fix the bad pieces and it's futile because what I improve is eventually undone when new content is rotated in. I'm just the systems guy, and our website is run by marketing.
acdha 10y ago
> From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. One look at the source code for most popular sites shows this isn't true – and that makes sense because when you look at the average sluggish site the bloat is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML source. What's actually happening is that a bunch of people are working hard on something which is important to them but not the user: advertising and analytics, followed by “social” sharing. Since those numbers are associated with revenue, they're directly seen as important whereas concerns about page-weight are more subtle and often an inadequate check on bloat until it gets really bad.
- 10y ago

malchow 10y ago

AMP was originally a more interesting project called PageSpeed that was open to anyone running webserver(s). I helped the Goog guys work on it by dint of having founded a premium adexchange company. It was great. AMP? Somewhat less great.

fixermark 10y ago
Actually, they're separate. PageSpeed is still here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- malchow 10y ago
  They were one and the same. AMP looked more profitable, so PageSpeed Service was deprecated. Only the documentation remains.
  - dandv 10y ago
    No, they weren't. Apache mod-pagespeed is and has been a completely different effort.

pcora 10y ago

Yep. Google Results are better but I switched to DDG because of AMP too. Crappy implementation that does not let me get the URL to share a link.

fixermark 10y ago
You can share the AMP link.
cekvenich3 10y ago
What is DDG?
- robin_reala 10y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/

cekvenich3 10y ago

Even w/o AMP you need to have a no javascript version for SEO. Even w/o AMP you need to have fast downloading images. Even w/o AMP you must use a CDN. So don't call it AMP. Call it: "SEO optimized and for when users are not on Wi-Fi or for huge scale/load". You can include the lighting bolt or not. Wha, wha.

techbio 10y ago

No one here seems to have mentioned Google's back-end wins from cached smaller, standardized code and images. It's their datacenter using fewer ops on more content to do what they initially set out to do--organize the world's information. Normalized images associated with a reduction in front-end presentation content can train the IRL bots orders of magnitude more quickly.

Groxx 10y ago

It'd be far more useful if they benchmarked rendering speed for pages (game-able, obviously, but so is everything), and just favored faster ones. AMP could be one of many systems then, instead of taking as much control as possible. Instead, we have a one-size-fits-all that they control utterly. No option to do something that works just as well, via different means (your own image compression, optimized http2 support, etc). Kill it with fire.